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Notes from the War Room
A historian of Christian martyrdom attends a Christian Right strategy session in the "War on Christians.”

...Speakers repeatedly juxtaposed “Christianity under assault worldwide” and the American political and cultural situation. For example, Lt. Gordon James Klingenschmitt, a Navy chaplain who has been disciplined for praying in Jesus’ name (in violation of Navy protocols) at public Navy-sponsored events, was a panelist in the first session of the conference, “Christian Persecution: Reports from the Front Lines.” Klingenschmitt made a striking and explicit argument from analogy by opening and closing his PowerPoint presentation with two paired photographs: a photograph of himself and one of Abdul Rahman, the Christian convert who had recently been on trial in Afghanistan for having abandoned Islam. In Klingenschmitt’s analysis, he and Rahman are the same in every way that matters: both persecuted Christians, both equal victims of the suppression of religious freedom, both casualties in the war on Christianity.


Other speakers were more modest in their efforts to connect the situation of American conservative Christians to the circumstances of Christians in other parts of the world, reminding the audience that Christians in China, North Korea, or “the deepest, darkest recesses of the Middle East” are, indeed, worse off. But such admissions also became the ground for dire prophecies: “Things aren’t so bad here…yet,” Tristan Emmanuel, a Canadian activist and author of Christophobia: The Real Reason Behind Hate Crime Legislation, commented from his post as the moderator of the Christian persecution panel. Yet, when Tom DeLay, the former majority leader of the House of Representatives who is currently under indictment for violations of campaign-finance laws, arrived on the second day of the conference to a standing ovation, Scarborough asserted that DeLay’s criminal indictment was simply the result of his being “the target of all who despise the cause of Christ” -- in short, DeLay is clearly another persecuted Christian. (Scarborough punctuated DeLay’s speech with the comment, “God always does his best work just after a crucifixion,” implying that DeLay’s prosecution is just such an act of imperial violence and judicial activism.)...

...Beginning with the premise that there is a war on Christianity, conference organizers and participants were eager to issue calls to arms in response. “We are under spiritual invasion!” intoned Rod Parsley, an evangelist from Ohio. “Man your battle stations! Ready your weapons! LOCK AND LOAD!” (The audience responded to these imperatives with a raucous and exuberant standing ovation.) Parsley also claimed that those Christian churches not sharing the perspective of the Christians represented at the conference constitute “the devil’s demilitarized zone,” naïvely and fatally embracing “peace at any price.” Meanwhile, Laurence Wright, a Lutheran pastor and co-president of Vision America, announced that the time of a peaceful and contemplative Christianity is over; that Christians have been AWOL (“absent without Lord”) in the battle; and that “We must attack the evil now where it is strongest” in order to restore America, the city high on a hill....

...Perhaps the most explicit call to arms came from Ron Luce, the president and founder of Teen Mania, a Christian revivalist youth ministry, and the author of Battle Cry for a Generation, a multimedia campaign that deploys military images and language to recruit soldiers in Christ’s army. Toward the end of his speech, Luce invoked the biblical story of the Levite’s concubine in Judges 19. (In the story, the Levite’s concubine is gang-raped by men who wanted to do sexual violence to the Levite. When the Levite’s host refuses to deliver the Levite to the assailants, he offers them his own virgin daughter and the Levite’s concubine instead. When the assailants reject such an exchange, the Levite simply expels the concubine from his house, leaving her to be raped repeatedly throughout the night. The following morning, upon finding the concubine’s dead body on his host’s doorstep, the Levite dismembers her and sends her body parts out to the twelve tribes of Israel as a provocation to revenge.) “I kind of feel like the Levite,” Ron Luce confessed. And then he uttered a battle cry of his own: “CUT UP THE CONCUBINE! CUT UP THE CONCUBINE! CUT UP THE CONCUBINE!” ...

...Critics of the conference and the individuals and groups that promote its point of view have suggested that “The War on Christians and the Values Voter in 2006” is simply a right-wing political project cynically framed as a project to protect a persecuted religious group. Such an analysis fails to recognize the sincerity of the 400 people who were gathered in that ballroom in Washington -- not that sincerity ought to serve as a bulwark against challenge and critique, to be sure. The menacing part of this project is not that it is political rather than religious, but that it is unapologetically a form of political religion. Which is what makes the calls for Christian militarization, for putting on the armor of God, for rising up in righteous revolution against “the culture” -- however metaphorical at this point in time -- particularly alarming. Students of Christian history will be well attuned to this kind of rhetoric and its materialization and embodiment in the actions of the righteous. Early Christian historian Michael Gaddis, for example, offers a brilliant and textured analysis of these dynamics in late ancient Christianity in his recent book, There Is No Crime for Those Who Have Christ”: Religious Violence in the Christian Roman Empire. As Gaddis illustrates, righteous Christian violence in the fourth and fifth centuries -- violence against non-Christians and “heretics” -- was justified in the first instance by reference to the persecution of Christians. With God on their side, everything is permitted. ...